


Lyanna's Secret Chamber

by virginea



Category: Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fantasy, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Ambiguous/Open Ending, Childhood Friends, F/M, Halloween, Random & Short
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-23
Updated: 2020-10-23
Packaged: 2021-03-07 22:13:53
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,780
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26855017
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/virginea/pseuds/virginea
Summary: Everything around them was absurdly vast in their memories. From the bookshelves in the library and the tall columns of the castle to the long steps that seemed endless as they led them to the crypts - all of it had a sense of grandeur in the safety of their minds when they were young and were ignorant of the changes that came with time."Are you sure we can be here Jon?" Dany asked him when they reached the bottom of the stairs and the beginning of the long corridor with the big statues of the Kings of Winter and Starks of old, dimly lit by the flames of the torches.Jon shrugged in response and held out a hand for her to follow. Dany still remembered how all her doubts had been dispelled at the mere sight of his outstretched hand.
Relationships: Jon Snow/Daenerys Targaryen
Comments: 10
Kudos: 34





	Lyanna's Secret Chamber

**Author's Note:**

> This is my first attempt at writing something relatively modern but still fantasy (I would never have believed it a couple of years ago when I was disdaining the genre).
> 
> I really just wanted to blend the dialogue in with an old idea of mine.
> 
> Enjoy.

**Lyanna's Secret Chamber**

Everything around them was absurdly vast in their memories. From the bookshelves in the library and the tall columns of the castle to the long steps that seemed endless as they led them to the crypts - all of it had a sense of grandeur in the safety of their minds when they were young and were ignorant of the changes that came with time.

"Are you sure we can be here Jon?" Dany asked him when they reached the bottom of the stairs and the beginning of the long corridor with the big statues of the Kings of Winter and Starks of old, dimly lit by the flames of the torches.

Jon shrugged in response and held out a hand for her to follow. Dany still remembered how all her doubts had been dispelled at the mere sight of his outstretched hand.

No one else but them dared to go down to the crypts. They said it was a cursed place, haunted by ghosts and lost souls that should not be disturbed from their eternal rest. Robb used to go with them sometimes, but since he was older than them for some months, his training began earlier and his free time had been reduced, leaving Dany and Jon alone on their adventures. In fact, few knew that it was not about the thrill of going down to where the dead rested but about what lay beyond it.

Jon and Dany stood in front of the statue of Princess Lyanna Stark, Jon's father's sister, who had been dead since they were just babies in the arms of some wet nurse. The eleven-year-old boy pushed the statue with his shoulder.

"Do you think what they say is true? That Lyanna was crazy?" Dany inquired. Nobody too sane would spend so much time on their own in a place like this, the girl thought. She and Jon did it because they had each other, otherwise, she believed that neither of them would have much interest in going down to the crypts. Not out of fear but because it went against Jon's father's wishes.

Jon stepped aside and took the small hand-held flashlight from his pants pocket. Above, the world had moved on, but here below it was as if they were living in the age of heroes.

"I don't know," he replied. “Maybe she was in the eyes of others. But not really."

With his flashlight, he searched for the switch that turned on the single lamp placed in the center of the ceiling. When the secret room behind Lyanna's statue lit up, he turned off his flashlight and walked at a leisurely pace, turning around to urge Dany inside as well.

"Do you ask me what I think? I think she just wanted to be left alone," Dany said while hopping in. 

I didn't ask you, Jon thought amusingly. But he always had a good predisposition for his best friend in the world. And Dany liked to talk for hours about any matter while he listened attentively without saying too much in response. 

Lyanna Stark's secret chamber was a place where all her things had been deposited after her death. Clothes, accessories, books, and a bunch of other things that had too much emotional value for Lord Stark to ever see again but that the children found fascinating. 

Jon had stumbled upon the place by accident when he, Dany, and Robb had hidden behind the statues to scare Sansa, whom they had brought to the crypts for the first time and intended to scare so she would never to expose them to Lady Stark again. The idea was to make her believe that the ghosts were on their side and that if she dared to betray them again the ghosts would haunt her. The plan never came to fruition and thus the four older children ended up venturing into the chamber which they would later discover was their late aunt's secret hiding place.

"I can understand her," Jon said. After all, he was like his aunt in that sense, alone and quiet. People would also call him crazy if they hadn't already had another pejorative term to attribute to him. Bastard. "Here it is," he murmured when he found among the things scattered in a crate, an old videotape.

"Is the one of Fleetwood's concert?"

"Yes," he replied, taking the videotape over to the televideo that had also been left behind with the rest of Lyanna's things. It was funny that while out in the corridor they seemed to be thousands of years in the past, in Lyanna's room it was still the nineties.

He turned on the player and thought about that saying they said the 70s were to the children of the 90s what the 90s were to the children of late. Or the teenagers of late, after all, they were already on that threshold from which there was no return.

One of the reasons they kept going down to the crypts to sneak into Lyanna's secret chamber is that her things were so interesting. Even a hateful girl like Sansa had decided to keep the secret between them in order to take some of the accessories from the late Lyanna for herself (always careful that neither her father nor mother saw her with it). Robb had taken what was perhaps the most precious item in the room, although that was not their business yet. Jon had chosen to claim her books, some fictional, some not so much and finally, Dany, unsurprisingly, had named the collection of vinyl records that Lyanna had stacked in another crate as her own.

Unlike Robb and Sansa, Jon and Dany chose to leave things in their place of eternal rest, at least of course one day they could take it all without making Lord Stark upset.

For that reason, they kept going down.

"I can't believe we didn't see those the first time," Dany commented as she leaned over the only beanbag in the room. In astonishment and perhaps the rush to find themselves in an unusual situation, none of the children had noticed the collection of videotapes. It was as if even dead, Lyanna could still keep secrets.

"Hurry up," Dany urged him playfully as she pushed Jon's shoulder with her bare foot.

"I'm on it, wait a second," he replied, holding her foot there in retaliation. "It's on."

Jon tumbled on the space Dany made for him on the beanbag when he got up.

The videotape contained the band's live performances of their most popular songs - most of them from the Rumours, of course.

"Stevie is so beautiful," Dany commented as soon as the image of Stevie Nicks appeared on the small TV screen, performing Dreams. He wanted to tell her that when he saw Stevie, he thought of her as well. They were both very beautiful and had that haze around them as if they really were not from this world but from another completely different place. Dany was actually. But that only made sense in his mind and he didn't think he could tell her head-on without sounding like a complete idiot.

"I wonder what was going through her head at that moment," then she said when the next song was playing.

The band was playing Go Your Own Way, the powerful send-off that Lindsey Buckingham had written to his ex Stevie Nicks, who was her bandmate and stood a few feet from him having to endure over and over his ex calling her a disheartened bitch.

"She seemed to want to punch Lindsey on the face," Jon opined, finding the situation funny and understandable.

"I think she's heartbroken," Daenerys objected.

The boy frowned.

"She dumped him," he pointed out as a no-brainer.

"You don't know that. And he wrote a song calling her a bitch that hundreds of thousands would listen to non-stop forever," she rebutted.

He shook his head from side to side, thinking it over, though still a bit reluctant. It was a very good song and after all, all the members of the band had been having a hard time - that had added to the genius of the album. Or so he had read on the internet.

"I think that made the song special. That you can pinpoint an exact moment in time when those feelings existed."

Dany looked at him with inquiring eyes. Rarely did her friend utter so many words in a row unless he was under Professor Luwin's watchful eyes during his tedious readings, but the few times that happened she remained silent for a while as if trying to urge him to keep talking. What made Jon special in front of her eyes was the fact that he was observant, but not really a talker, therefore his perspective was always interesting to take into account.

Of course, back then she was just an eleven-year-old girl and many things in her head were just innocent thoughts.

They stayed for a while just watching the concert as the minutes passed, Dany humming only Stevie's parts, whilst her head was shaking along to the songs. 

"I want to be like her," Dany blurted out suddenly.

"Break a guy to the point where he writes you a song calling you a bitch?"

Then he was sorry for Robb. His brother had confessed to him a while ago that he had a crush on Dany. He wasn't the only one and it probably wouldn't be the last. Dany didn't seem to think about those things though, and Jon thought it was for the best. He was sure she saw them both as two annoying older brothers. 

Daenerys hit his shoulder with hers.

"I want to be a singer and write songs that people will listen to and sing for generations," she confided to him.

Jon had no doubt that his best friend was capable of it.

"Do it then," he encouraged her.

"You know I can't," Dany reminded him.

And there was the crux of the problem again, the answer that he couldn't give her. What made this secret room special was not the thrill of breaking a strictly imposed rule but what lay beyond it all - the world of possibilities that it opened to them. Outside the room and above the crypts it is their world…and it was complicated, to put it in one word. And they both knew it very well, even though they were only eleven and twelve years old respectively.

Since Jon couldn't press the point, he just said,

"I bet Stevie would like to be like you."

"Like me?" Dany asked incredulously. Why would Stevie Nicks, a living legend, want to be like her, just an eleven-year-old girl?

"You are a real witch."

They looked at each other, undaunted. Then they both burst into laughter.

"Very good point," Daenerys acknowledged as Rhiannon began to sound in the background.

Daenerys was the last descendant of the Red Coven, a long dynasty of witches that had started with Great Witch Visenya Targaryen. The Starks also had magic but theirs was the complete opposite - it was the male descendants who inherited such power. Robb, Jon, Bran, and Rickon were the next witches of their generation while Sansa and Arya, their sisters, would become wardeness. Unless some of them showed signs of handling magic, in which case they would be one of the exceptional cases of Stark women who could, like the late Lyanna.

However, it was said that these exceptions to the rule never ended well in the long run. Unfortunately, Lyanna was an example of that. And in Daenerys' family, her father and her brothers.

Jon offered to find a way to get the video out onto digital media, but Daenerys strongly objected, saying it would arouse Lady Stark's suspicions anyway. As young apprentices, there were strict rules to follow. Contact with the human world at their age was limited to knowing enough to be able to go unnoticed among them.

"We'll just go back another day," she said after a long sigh, returning the videotape to its place among the other forgotten stuff.

 _Forgotten until they found them_ , she reminded herself.

Jon waited for Dany to come out into the hall before turning off the light. When both children were in the out of the chamber and he had pushed Lyanna - her statue - back into place, then they heard the hissing.

There was another legend among the people who lived in the Northern Kingdom about Winterfell. Like the rest of the kingdoms and their ancient castles, it was said that from time to time the red witches appeared in the most remote places to feed on the residual magic left off the dead. Although a strange event, given the differences between their kind and those of the North, the appearance of one of them that day in the crypts while Daenerys and Jon were there, later would make total sense.

"Did you hear that Jon?" Dany asked.

Jon had heard it too, so he pointed the flashlight in the opposite direction to the one they should follow to return.

The hiss was heard again as the children took a few steps towards it. Then it stopped sounding as such, and the disturbing giggle of someone who was clearly provoking them began. 

"Robb, we already know it's you," Daenerys scolded her other friend. 

_I don't think Robb laughs like that_ , Jon thought.

"A clever boy, his name is Jon Snow," a voice said, startling them with its strangeness.

"Who is there?" Jon asked, annoyance in his voice.

"Not who, _what_ ," answered the strange voice that they could tell now was clearly female. "Just another one from the lot."

Daenerys opened her mouth and her eyebrows rose when she finally saw the silhouette of that woman among the statues of two Kings of Winter, almost at the end of the hall. Her hair was red, much more intense than the red in Sansa and Lady Stark's hair. 

"Your hair looks out of this world too, like the the moon that gleamed at night across the room," the red witch said.

Her dark gaze was terrifying as well as hypnotic, it seemed to invite them to get closer but to be careful at the same time.

Both Dany and Jon knew that it was a red witch and that it was common for them to appear in the places of the castle where magic resided. That is why the surprise at her appearance was not as much as the fact that she showed up from all the people to them.

Red witches were known to carry bad omens.

"My name is Melissandre and I come from the distant realm of Asshai," she began, "Where there are no restrictions of any kind and magic in abundance can be found."

Yes, and where those who disturb the balance go, the children knew. Asshai was where everything had started millions of years ago, according to the legend.

The Red Mother and the Silver Sire had created their kind, and their descendants, the children of gold, the children of the rose, the children of water, the children of air, the children of the sun, the children of winter and the children of fire, followed it by forming the covens that ruled the world of witches. A world that should live in peace with the world of non-believers.

As in any community of believers, there were zealots. And the Red witches believed that the world should go back to being that chaotic place where there was only power and magic, and not order.

"A child of fire and a child of ice, favored by the Red Mother and the Silver Sire," the witch began to recite, as she crawled on top of the platform that contained the remains of some King of Winter they did not know the name of.

Her prompt threatening stance made Jon instinctively push Dany behind him and Dany will start to consider using her magic to defend themselves. Of the two, Dany was always more determined to make use of it.

"I see a legend and I see a hero," Melissandre continued prophesying. "I see a love they'll try to erode." The smile on her face was haunting. "Do not fear, young apprentices. For fate is written and the ink has dried. Azor Ahai and his beloved Nissa Nissa have come back."

"Daenerys! Jon!"

When Lord Stark's scream echoed from afar, the witch threw her head back and began to laugh uproariously as if she had done something terrible that could only bring satisfaction to her and her, for now, unknown devices.


End file.
